Tag Archives: horror

Cry_Wolf

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As it happened, I managed to squeeze another movie in on Thursday after all. It probably would have been Flightplan, only the timing was off. So, I picked the horror movie I preferred of the two that are out right now, Cry_Wolf.

The title gives away almost everything, of course. You have a group of prep school seniors and the new guy who wants to fit in. They hatch a plan to follow up the murder of a local girl by creating an urban legend of a serial killer who has struck several campuses in the past killing various people from the school in the same way, but always starting with the dead townie. But then, the killer starts threatening the kids via IM and large stabby knife. OR DOES HE??? And in a completely shocking twist, none of the cops or school admninistrators believe them for some reason. For that matter, they can barely trust each other. It reminds me of a fairy tale or fable or something I read sometime, but frankly I can’t be bothered to investigate further.

We’re looking at three parts Wild Things[1] to one part April Fool’s Day[2], but with the ongoing PG-13 breastlessness that is either what has revitalized the genre via wider ticket sales or else strangling it via the removal of core values. I’m not sure which it is, but I suppose as long as the plot (not the dialogue, though, believe me) is mildly intelligent, I shouldn’t complain too much.

[1] Down to the same wet, chilled blue bikini top.
[2] It’d be cool if I could make a direct comparison here too, like if someone had the same noose-shaped braid. But that never actually happened in the movie, much to my disappointment.

The Cave

The important thing is, I’m back in the groove. Well, and that there’s a lot of stuff coming out over the next couple of months, now that the summer dry season is over. I am disappointed to realize that no matter how good I think Flightplan is going to be, it cannot possibly stand up to the sheer artistry that is its preview. Still, though. Also coming soon, Venom and The Fog (not to be confused with The Mist, by Stephen King; I can tell, because I did for nearly half the preview) and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Not to mention the couple that I missed. My point here is to say that, although slasher movies haven’t quite resurged, the horror movie is back. Hooray!

Oh, right, also I watched one last night. The Cave is the story of… well, you see, there’s this hole in the ground, under an old Templar church, with rock formations and underground dwelling creatures, and an underground river to boot. It’s sort of… well, I suppose the best way to describe would be that it’s a cave.

And, yeah, the plot is every bit as straightforward as the title. People die in approximately the order and number that you’d expect them to, after having seen the entire cast introduction sequence. (In fact, at one point I thought the wrong person was about to die, and I was aggravated at them for ruining the formula pointlessly. But, no, they came through.) The biggest flaw[1] was that rather than let the killer monsters just be random killer monsters, they attempted to explain the cause behind the random killer monsters, but then just left the cause dangling instead of doing anything particularly interesting with it.

Well, no, the biggest flaw was PG-13 rather than R. There’s something altogether off-putting about seeing a bikini rather than boobies or hearing ‘motherf-‘ rather than motherfucker in this kind of movie, and just so that the distributors can trick themselves into believing it will sell more tickets this way. Schlock cinema, even in the midst of its resurgence, is basically dead.[2] Woe.

[1] No. Being a formulaic horror movie does not qualify as a flaw. Shut up.
[2] I blame the homogenization of the movie theater landscape, combined with how the theaters are beholden to the movie studios, in a way that they were not just twenty years ago. The death of the drive-in is not a cause, but it is certainly another effect of this same cause. As usual, anytime massive success in a sector leads in the slightest amount toward monopolization, the niche suffers. Luckily, I can still go into a Fry’s and find such brilliant titles as Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker! But without any kind of advertising or preview budget, most of these movies languish unwatched in direct-to-video limbo, simply because they are completely unheard of. So… you’re welcome? I’ll keep doing my job, anyway.

Dark Water (2005)

mv5botcymdq3mjetnjzkos00zdq0lwe1ywmtytnknmnizju0mzhhxkeyxkfqcgdeqxvymtqxnzmzndi-_v1_There’s nothing about doing a job search via the internet that really sucks up a lot of your time, assuming you have a pre-made résumé just waiting to go. And I do. Which leaves me with no good excuse for going most of a week with two more movies under my belt, and yet, here I am. If I hadn’t conveniently lost my out of print Brust novel, I’d be a book behind by now, too.

In any case, the J-horror invasion continues, this time menacing Jennifer Connelly with some Dark Water, which is worse than it sounds because, seriously, said water looked very, very gross. As usual, the dread builds up pretty well over time, and also as usual, the Eastern plotting style never quite gels with my Western expectations. There’s a whole plot wrapped up around Jennifer having issues with being late, dating to her childhood, and then halfway through the movie, it’s dropped completely. More damning, though, is that she didn’t spend half as much time soaked as I was expecting from the title and previews. So much for my predictions about ‘the role she was born to play’. Don’t despair, though. Tim Roth’s lawyer is worth the price of admission, if perhaps not the amount of time it takes to get him on the screen. (Note: he doesn’t spend any time soaked, so that’s not why.)

I’m starting to wonder what the deal is with the Japanese psyche that so much of its fear elements are wrapped up in motherhood issues. Not every single movie I’ve seen in this particular horror genre hits the topic, but it’s holding steady at 75 percent. I bet there’s a paper in this that I would be forced to write if I were in film school, and I’d pass because of how it’s a foreign film thing, even though otherwise I’d fail because it’s horror and that’s not real film-making. Or perhaps I’m unnecessarily bitter.

Land of the Dead

The good thing about a George Romero zombie movie is that you’ve got awesome social commentary if you go for that kind of thing, you’ve got zombie mayhem if you go for that kind of thing, both if you’re like me, and if you like zombies but hate social commentary, it’s not like you’ll notice.

The bad thing about them is that for people who like social commentary but not so much with the zombies, you can never really convince them that a zombie movie can have intrinsic value. I (of course) mean here intrinsic value of the type that everyone recognizes in movies like Sophie’s Choice or Snow Falling on Cedars or bullstuff like that. The intrinsic zombie movie value of Land of the Dead, with its extensive gore, random zombie strippers (CORRECTION: random regular strippers), gratuitous undead attacks on lesbians, and senseless violence against midgets, well, it has all of that, too. But I’m talking about the Romero-style commentary you get in his zombie movies, the part that lets you see past the zombies and realize he could have made the exact same movie without ghoulish hordes, but was cool enough not to.

Is it my place to say what the themes were this time? Clearly, it is. The movie is set years or possibly decades after the original zombie outbreak; a few walled cities contain the vestiges of humanity, and the zombies cover the rest of the earth. The divide (social, intellectual, perhaps even moral) between zombie and human is rapidly narrowing from both directions. It reminded me a lot of I Am Legend, for whatever that’s worth. On top of the dark mirror motif, there’s some (perhaps meant to be relevant to the world of now?) extensive Circus Maximus keeps the citizens happy while the Huns rampage just outside the walls of Rome imagery going on. I think there’s something to be said for the idea that the two themes are intertwined, but then, I’m just a guy who types with two or three fingers, so what do I know?

Also, there were boobies.

Zero Hour

So far, there are seven books in the Resident Evil series; of those, five of them are based on entries in the videogame series of the same name. The most recent, Zero Hour, is a prequel in much the same way that the game Resident Evil Zero was. Well, ha ha, that’s an understatement, since it’s not only a novelization of that game, but also the most by-the-numbers novelization of the whole series.

Credit where it’s due, the author has taken on a somewhat herculean task here. It’s hard to write the book of a game whose main focuses (after shooting zombies, I mean) are holding onto ammunition and solving crazy spy puzzles, without devolving into ridiculous parody. Somehow, she manages to take it all seriously, in part by paradoxically keeping the characters aware of the farce of it all. There are things you accept in a game that nobody would in real life, and the ability to roll their eyes at having to light the lamps in the right order to release the gate is exactly the same kind of ability that keeps them sane in the face of bio-engineered hordes thirsty for their blood. And, y’know, their juicy, delicious brains.

On the downside, like I said, this is the least good adaptation. Sure, the characters are allowed to get out of some fights in a way that the game characters are not, and sure, they laugh at the craziness, but I’m pretty sure I don’t remember ever reading a quite so faithful account of what weapons and ammo are picked up when, and how close they are to running out. But, other than how badly that grates, it’s a perfectly serviceable book of its type, and as in other entries in the series, she adds touches here and there that make the book hers outside the confines of the games. Still, if you don’t just absolutely adore the whole Umbrella-verse, there’s no point to picking it (or any of the others) up.

Jan-Gel 3: Hillbilly Monster

I need to preface this statement by pointing out that I was watching the DVD on my laptop, from work. Which is to say, instead of actively working. Now that I’ve made this point, I shall continue.

That was the longest and least-well spent 82 minutes of my life.

Apparently, being in the Ed Wood acting pool is sufficient grounds for making movies of your very own these days. Thusly, Hillbilly Monster. The heartwarming tale of… I’m not going to lie. To explain the plot, it would have had to actually have a plot. What it had was a loosely related series of events surrounding the titular beast and his escape from a carnival freakshow and subsequent sojourn at a sanitarium.

It was the biggest waste of film I can ever remember seeing. I’m not saying that as a metaphor for ‘it was bad’ (although it was; it was terrible, with only rare flashes of so-bad-it’s-funny (although the zen state taken on as the movie progressed made these moments not merely funny, but actively hilarious, so there’s that)), but as literal fact. There’s just a ton of footage that went on too long, added nothing to the story, and often both at once. Also, of course, the acting was largely tragic even for the parts that needed to be there in the first place. I sincerely believe that a completely random sampling of people would have resulted in more talent on average. I would also here claim that I was writing better scripts at the age of seven and directing better films at fourteen, but I don’t feel comfortable doing so without finding and verifying the things in question; time may have inflated the minimal accomplishments in my mind.

Lastly, though, I want to take the opportunity to make reference to a cinematic oddity this reminded me of. Apparently, the half-human and half-ape creature is a descendant of the original Jan-Gel, whence the reference in the title. The oddity is the lack of a Jan-Gel 2, so far as I could determine. This reminded me of the House movies (The Greatest American Hero owns a haunted house and hangs out with Cheers and Night Court co-stars), which consisted of House, House II: The Second Story, and House IV. Even though imdb exists now and I’ve solved the mystery of the missing House movie to my satisfaction, still: stuff like this is of genuine interest to me. What other horror movie sequels have vanished into the mists, only to be seen in some parallel dimension? Rest assured, I’ll never stop seeking them out. Never! Well, okay, probably not Jan-Gel 2, because, my God. But in the general case, never!

As far as this movie, a better use of your time and money would be on the largely brilliant Freak Show, by the Residents. Or HBO’s Carnivàle, obviously. I mean, unless you like this kind of thing. Some people do, I hear. Even, apparently, me. (But other people, too. I swear I’m not making this up.)

Chakushin Ari

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I have a sense that I’m occasionally going to have to plan trips to Austin solely for the movie-watching opportunities. You know, after I move. Right now, all the planning it takes is remembering to walk out the door a touch over an hour before the movie starts. Which is sufficiently non-trivial that I skip out on lots of stuff I’d love to see, already. So, yeah, that whole going to Austin thing is gonna suck. Perhaps I’ll plan weekends around it, based on cool-movie density. Until then, though, I get to review randomly awesome movies that nobody else has ever heard of.

Such as the one I saw last night, One Missed Call. Yet another Japanese horror movie (as you could probably already tell by the confluence of the imdb-transliterated entry title and my well-documented movie tastes), and it’s getting to the point where there are definitely tropes for the genre. A couple of obvious ones are that the scary avenging spirit must have bad, face-concealing hair and that mirrors are more trustworthy windows on reality than unaided eyes. Plus, there’s the thing where technology has a terrifying dark side. I think that’s what keeps me coming back, and why American horror can’t compete. There’s nothing that terrifies us as a people united, the way that Japan was terrified by the atom bomb in 1945. Without that cultural consciousness to lend gravity to generations of authors and film-makers, we’ve just got people throwing darts and then duplicating the things that work, over and over again, without any solid idea of why they worked. Thus endeth my sojourn into the comparative anatomy of 25 years of US horror movies vs. 10 years of Japanese horror movies.

As far as the movie at hand: It was longer than I’m used to a horror movie being, because it was trying to be a lot of things. “They’ll kill us through our cellphones” is one of them, and it worked now as well as Ringu must have in 1998, because everyone has a cellphone / everyone had a VCR, so immediately your audience is going to identify with what makes it fundamentally scary. So, that was successful. It was also trying to be “The media does not care if it destroys your soul in the quest for ratings”, and that one also worked. That particular sequence makes me think that someone will want to remake this for American audiences, because of how well we can understand what the film-maker was going for. In point of fact, I wonder if it was a jab at the American media specifically, or if Japan has it as bad as we do.

Sadly, the rest of the things it was trying to be (“Look out for the psycho-killer”, “Stop abusing me, mommy”, “A glimpse of the afterlife”) were less effective. Not because any of them are uninteresting themes, but because they kept being crowded out by the primary two and by each other. The way it worked out in the end was that I found the imagery sufficiently disturbing for the cheap thrills part of my brain, and the themes scary enough for the analytical part, that I was completely satisfied by the horror movie experience. Despite that, I had a couple of niggling questions, things that I wish I had understood better and wonder if I would have, coming at it from the Japanese mindset instead of my tragically self-involved Western one.

If you have a way to rent it or see it somewhere and you liked the Ring, you should catch it. A bonus spot for me was that I could tell the people apart. This makes me feel less bad about myself over the Ju-on thing where I couldn’t. Instead of blaming it on my cultural insensitivity, I can now blame it on either the out-of-order narrative or the casting director for actually picking people who did all look alike. Another bonus spot: unexpected boobies. I didn’t think they did that in Japanese horror. Unless you are me, probably you should watch it only for the first reason, and not based on the bonus spots.

The Amityville Horror (2005)

MV5BMzc1Njc2NDc3NV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwODYyNzI3._V1__SX1217_SY911_There should be more horror movies showing, because it makes it a lot easier to hit the theater when there’s not really anything that you particularly want to see. Sure, it may not be great, but at least you can be sure of good, clean, passable fun. And sometimes, it is great.

In the case of the Amityville Horror remake, I was solidly in the former experience. Which was disappointing, but only because it started out with such promise. The cast was trimmed down and the plot tightened up over the original, keeping the focus on the house and the family, where it needed to be[1]. Both the camerawork and the script kept the three-story house and multi-acre lot feeling claustrophobic, all the better to let all manner of Indian ghosts, angry woodsmen, and imaginary friends leap into frame at any moment. Which, you see, results in terror.

The problem was a little too much reveal. So many visible scary images so early on left the director without any room to escalate gracefully, and as a result, the final act was overwrought at its best, laughably silly at its worst. I think what makes me the saddest is how easy that would have been to avoid, and make the story feel as believable at the end as it was at the beginning.

[1] Oh, right, the plot in 60 seconds, if you don’t know it: The Lutz family moves into this house a year after the previous family were all murdered in their sleep by the eldest son, who claimed that voices told him to. Lots of strange badnesses occur, and they are no longer living there a mere 28 days later. Based on a true story. (Y’know, maybe.)

Amityville II: The Possession

I have arcane rules for when to review a movie, rules that I only barely understand myself. I try not to break them, though. It has to be an event movie, like if I go to the theater, or otherwise sit down by myself or with a group of people specifically to watch the movie. If it just happened to be on the TV, no. I have to stay awake all the way through it. (This pitfall is usually not based on quality, but just on tiredness, and I’ve broken it once so far. No, I’m not saying when. I will say that this pitfall is what will prevent me from reviewing The Amityville Horror (original), which I watched on the same night as this one.) If it’s something I’ve seen before, the scrutiny gets worse, because how much can I reasonably take out of a movie on repeat viewings? Then I have to really feel it before writing anything down. This is in contrast to books, which I intend to review every time I read through one, first time or not. Because there’s more of a personal investment to it, I guess. Games would be on the book end rather than the movie end, except there are way too many games for me to replay any.

The sad part is, I broke my rule and wasn’t going to review Amityville II: The Possession despite it meeting all of my criteria. But it keeps tumbling about in my head, and so I must. Let me start off by making this perfectly clear. This is a bad movie, a terrible movie, really. The acting aspires to golden moments of competency, but rarely succeeds. The storyline is really no worse than most schlocky horror films, but it ends about an hour in, while the movie drags on for thirty grueling minutes beyond that point. There’s absolutely no reason you should watch it, other than if the review makes you curious. That said, if you do plan to watch it of your own accord, don’t read any further, as I am going to spoil the hell out of it. (I wish I could say ‘no pun intended’ here, with a fake little laugh that proves the opposite; unfortunately, I can’t, because there’s no actual pun here. You’d think so, in a movie about demonic possession and the grisly murder of an entire family. But, no.)

So this family moves into a three-story house in New York, in the 1970s. The father is kind of an asshole, the mother shows classic Edith Bunker signs of abuse, and then there are four kids, two of them young, plus an older son and his live-in girlfriend. There’s some kind of mysterious underground chamber which opens and closes at will, blows out cold air, and dripped blood and flies all over a repairman. Much to my personal frustration, though, nobody ever investigated it extensively. Also, the son starts to be possessed by a demon, the symptoms of which include setting up a pretend sexy photoshoot with his girlfriend, acting sullen and withdrawn around his parents, occasional bursts of anger, and lots of sly sarcasm. Well, and sometimes his skin starts pulsating and turns green, but only ever when he’s by himself and nobody else can see it happen. Then, later, the family’s priest goes off with his porn-moustached “friend” on a “camping trip”, instead of responding to their pleas for help about the weird things going on, and the son kills everyone in the house before the priest can get back in time to save them. Feeling guilty over the whole fiasco, he breaks the son out of protective custody and then exorcises the demon from the son into himself, thus removing the kid’s one good trial defense. Then the movie ends, with the priest sitting up there in the corner of the attic, twitching with demonic angst.

So, yeah, that was weird. But you should know that I lied at one point in the above narrative. It was for effect, but it was also because I got fooled in this exact way, until someone pointed it out to me. The live-in girlfriend? Actually, she’s the eldest daughter. But there they are, in the first scenes of the movie, way before any of the demon-y stuff starts up, flirting like mad. That probably should have been a clue, I guess. You don’t get that level of sexual tension out of people who are actually involved with each other. But right from the start, neither the direction nor the acting give any indication that they’re related to each other. It’s not that I’m outraged here over the lack of making incest feel icky factor. It’s that every expository indication from the film is telling me that it’s supposed to be icky, but at the same time there’s this dissonance in that it’s filmed as straight-up, regular, completely run-of-the-mill behavior between the two of them. Even by the time the nude photography role-playing scene comes along and it’s clear they’re brother and sister, well, by then he’s all demonic, but she looks like she’s uncomfortable only that she hasn’t yet come up with an excuse to say yes to everything he wants to happen. Then later when she’s confessing to the priest, her big sin in her own mind is premarital sex, not incest. It seems like she wants the priest to help out so that her boyfriend will stop acting weird, and that’s it. Allow me to reiterate that there’s never any hint she’s being controlled by evil, either.

So, what you’ve got is a tremendously bad bit of film that has only two characters with any free will, both of which I found deeply compelling yet impossible to really understand. One of them a priest who makes consistently bizarre, nonsensical choices about how to deal from moment to moment and is wracked by guilt over each one, and ultimately ends up filled with a demon and with no hint of what becomes of him after. The other a teenage schoolgirl who is to all appearances in love with her older brother, demon or not, and who the film treats as not in any way out of the ordinary.[1] Yet, somehow, the demon thought she was just as worthy of death as the rest of the family, so she takes a rifle shot to the gut, just like everyone else. I wish I knew if they’d be equally compelling outside the context of this particular movie, because I’m probably going to steal them someday, if it’s at all feasible.

[1] Untrue: at one point, her brother hugs her on his birthday, and despite the hug being almost completely normal except that it might have lingered for no more than a second too long, the mother immediately figures out what’s going on somehow, and then later when the sister goes inside to find him since he’s the only person not outside celebrating his own birthday party, in favor of another bout of turning green and pulsating under his skin in the privacy of his attic bedroom, she gets slapped by the mother for her trouble. There was really no reason for the mother to figure out anything there, nor did the scene have any consequences. Based on the rest of the movie, my only conclusion is that the slap was borne out of jealousy rather than anger at sin.

The Ring Two

MV5BMTY2ODc2NTQ2OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNzA4OTU3._V1_I finally got out to a movie again, which is nice, because I was starting to feel bad about how few I’ve seen this year. (Barely more than one per month!) Despite the overcrowded and subsequently hot theater, I went for the one I wanted to see the most out of my available choices, The Ring Two. The title really bothers me, and I don’t know why. Is it because it’s too short or monosyllabic to have the number appended? Is it because it’s written out instead of numeralized? Maybe it’s just because the posters with Two written out and the o matches the Ring imagery from the original movie is so brilliant that any other vision of the title pales by comparison. Seriously, good poster. I kinda wish I collected movie posters. Perhaps once I have a bigger house I’ll make a poster room, and spend a lot of unnecessary money on eBay.

So, yeah, there’s this movie. The first one was really scary, despite the ridiculous premise that people are still watching anything on videotape. As the movie opened, and I know it’s only supposed to be six months later by plot, but it’s been several years in real life, and also the kid is the same actor, so he looks several years older, and my point here is even if I could handle it in 2002, no way am I going to buy into the videotape thing in 2005, and as the movie opened I was already rolling my eyes. (Also: I was starting to think that opening night is a bad time to see a horror movie, because too many people were too amused, but that faded at the same time my eye-rolling did, so I instead take this as proof that the rest of America agrees with me on the ridiculousness of anyone watching a videotape, or probably even owning a VCR.) Luckily, the people making the movie seemed to get that, and the plot unleashed the scary drowned spider girl into a different, somewhat less scary[1] but more emotionally resonant and symbolism-filled world.

Symbolism and to spare. Lots of iconic ring and related images to be found all over the place. (I can’t go into detail there without spoiling the first movie.) Lots of water imagery. A distorted reflection of the maternal themes in Aliens, which now that I think about it was also less scary but more emotionally resonant than the movie it was a sequel to. I like this thing where horror movies are deep, but still manage to get in the scary cinematography, oppresive musical score, and sure, occasional cheap thrill. It’s kind of like science fiction in the literary world, in that there’s room to explore pretty much anything you can imagine, yet it’s all lumped together in one critically dismissed (although increasingly less so, in both cases) category based strictly on a setting that everyone assumes isn’t adult enough to care about.

Scary? Sure. Good plot? For the most part, although I still don’t really get what it is that Samara actually does to her victims. I think this is a Japanese horror trope, the idea that you can be scared to death without worrying about what was so scary, so I’m willing to let it go. It is creepily effective, so it’s easy to not mind. Extras for people who just want to see boobies and cameos? Naomi Watts is the star of a movie filled with water-related events, so you do the math there. Also, Bingo Bob has an amusing turn as a real estate agent. (And gets fourth or so billing out of basically a cameo-sized appearance, which surprised me; but the cast is small and therefore more personal, which is a good thing for the story as written.)

[1] With the exception of Halloween 2, all horror movie sequels are less scary. And it’s only as scary, because no horror sequels are more scary than the original. Can’t be done.